Out of Chaos an organizing newsletter
Anxiety and Archeology
Sometimes I feel like an archeologist: I sift through layers from different time periods and try and learn something about the people who made the pile and attempt to make sense out of it. I find it fascinating, working my way backward through time: last week, last month, last year… as themes and stories begin to reveal themselves.
To be honest, a lot of what is revealed is anxiety. I heard on NPR that health officials can anticipate epidemics by following Google searches for certain symptoms. My measures may not be as scientific, but I’d still vouch for their accuracy.
Here’s what I mean: If I’m going through the piles on someone’s desk, there will be normal stuff, bills, forms and so forth, but then there will usually be some other category of clippings or brochures. Sometimes there are duplicates of one thing, other times it’s a variety of materials, but it is often revealing. Among my clients with children, getting them into college is a common anxiety. Often I will find articles and scratched-on bits of paper with the names of books that helped a friend and flyers for test prep or invitations to workshops. All perfectly reasonable, but they often don’t realize how much there is until I ask: “Shouldn’t we start a file?” Another common anxiety is retirement. People clip things and save letters from financial advisors, and they aren’t aware of how much they’ve been saving until we sit down and go through the piles of papers.
I get it. I’m an anxious person, and I believe that anxiety can be a powerful motivator—but if all those papers are in a pile, you don’t know what is making you anxious, so you can’t take actions to alleviate your anxiety. What a waste! So face your papers, be the archeologist of your own life, and if something scares you, make a file. It’s only the first step, but the second step will be easier and clearer if you have all your information in one place.